This
article first appeared in the February 1989 issue of New Dimensions
magazine.

We
tend to think of "conformity" and "rebellion" as
opposite forms of behavior. Yet rebellion and conformity, in their usual
form, are actually two sides of the same syndrome. Both are responses
to pressure which keep the victim reacting to, and therefore "conforming"
to, the pressure source. There is a third way of dealing with pressure
that involves neither rebellion nor conformity, which allows a person
to fully develop his innate potential, without outside interference.

Injustice
drives people to rebellion—injustice in politics, in the home, in
education, in the dog-eat-dog business world—in a system based on
legality rather than on fairness, common sense, and decency. And yet the
usual form of rebellion is not a reasonable response; it is an unreasonable
response to unreasonable pressure, and in our rebellion we are all overtly
or quietly going mad.

There
is a creative rebellion, a rebellion without emotion, judgment, or resentment,
a rebellion that consists simply of the poised observation of what is.
But few know about this correct rebellion, because early in life we get
sucked into a destructive one that works against our best interests. Even
the most quiet, sticky-sweet people are secretly violent, which manifests
in their victims as expressed violence. What I am saying is that society
is made up of the obviously rotten and the apparently good, each type
perpetuating the system that produces rebels and conformists.

Rebellion
arises against cruel authority, but behind such authority stands hypocrisy.
The real sinners are not the rebels but those who drive them to rebellion—the
wolves in sheep's clothing: cruel parents, teachers, preachers, bureaucrats,
and the downright criminals hiding behind the cloaks of station and legality.

Rebellion
can never free you so long as strong emotion is involved, simply because
the emotion which converts your discernment of the injustice before you
into a judgment of it, causes you then to become secretly subject to the
injustice. The hostility that accompanies your judgment transfers to you
the character and behavioral disorders of those against whom you would
rebel. For example, when you resent (judge) another's judgment of you,
in the process you become like the one who judged you: judgmental. Being
judgmental then prevents your effectively rebelling. You cannot correct
the system because you are reflecting it—beginning to be what you
were rebelling against. Hostility causes you to struggle between the no-win
choices of rebellion and conformity.

As you
fail to affect the system for good and as it affects you for ill, your
pride, your ego, feels your failure. It steps in and tries to counteract
the effect inside you with more emotion, of hate or "love."
That only complicates your dilemma. Your ego does not want to see that
you are like those you despise. Refusing to face this truth, by denying
facts and rationalizing, you are now rebelling against the truth in your
mind. Again, resentment is at work. The same thing is happening in you
that you despise in others.

You
see, they are victims too. Long ago, as children, your tormentors were
made to doubt the Truth within them, and as they fell from grace, the
spirit of pride entered and compelled them to overreact in the extreme
to injustices, real and imagined, so as to evolve their "beast."
Rebelling and conforming kept them so preoccupied they did not have to
see what was taking place. An implanted identity does the same thing to
everyone. Resentment, judgment, rebellion, and servitude fixate your mind
so completely that all you can think about is getting even with or ahead
of those who put you down, from whom you learned to become unjust.

Suppose
I wished to make you do something you ordinarily would not do. Taking
your rebellious nature into account, I would forbid you to do this or
that. Perhaps I would act angry to pressure you, fully knowing you would
react by doing just what I have forbidden, which is what I secretly wanted
you to do. Anyone can control you in this fashion and you will not detect
the deception. Indeed, efforts to persuade you of it will fail, because
pride, being the enemy of Truth, rebels against all realization. Even
if, as your manipulator, I told you what I had done to you, you wouldn't
believe me because you would rebel still, against the explanation, rather
than accept the truth. And what, may I ask, do you accept when you rebel
against Truth? More of the enemy's will, of course!

So beware
of the wicked ones who have discovered (through their own experience)
the helplessness of the victim in rebellion, and have learned to acquire
power through intimidation. All manipulators, whether they realize it
or not, are part of an ancient conspiracy against mankind. The same spirit
that in one manipulator establishes doubt and rebellion in you, inhabits
another who appears as a buddy—a friend and comforter of "your"
cause. It often happens that enemy and "friend" occupy the same
body, typically in a schizoid parent who fluctuates between extreme moods
of rage and "love." The cruel, bad mood establishes the mad,
rebellious nature; then the kind mood turns around and reinforces the
self it put inside you.

Being
cruel one moment and kind the next is characteristic of manipulators—in
particular of lost, loveless, impatient parents who, whenever they feel
guilty for driving their offspring to desperate acts, finish them off
by becoming their "friend." And once you have been corrupted
by cruelty and then "helped" by the tormentor-turned-savior,
you are set up to be addicted to a succession of confounding hate/love
involvements with lower and lower low-life people.

Schizoid
parents often set their children up to become criminals; then friends/fiends
egg them on. From this it is easy to see how you can become afraid of
"love," and why young people often react to kindness with violence.
Such striking out is a child's way of hurting the source of a hurtful
love, to stop it from "loving" and possessing and corrupting.
But what do most parents do when their children hurt them? They become
upset, angry and violent themselves; then feeling guilty for this, they
work harder at "loving" the child to overcome his rejection.

The
corruption that begins at home continues at school. Considering how cruel
teachers can be to children, it is practically a certainty that your child
will pick up wrong friends to soothe the effects of bullying in the classroom.
And so he becomes the puppet of both bullies and friends.

The
spirit of rebellion, once established, will seek both provocations and
support to justify its expression. The fallen soul's very existence, co-mingling
with pride that has entered, depends upon intrigue and reaction in the
extreme. If there is nothing to rebel against, boredom and anxiety set
in. Unconsciously perhaps, you will set about to engineer something to
resent. You will find someone to spoil until he takes advantage of you.
You will needle someone into rebellion against you so that you may struggle
against his rebellion. Spoiled by having his own way, a willful son knows
how to trick his mother into being a nag. He simply drags his feet over
doing some petty chore, timing it to upset her and to make her pressure
him so that he can then utilize her pressuring to justify his continued
stubbornness. Later, the irresponsible nature formed in this game will
need a wife to nag it. And what kind of a woman marries such a man, may
I ask? The kind who needs to be a nag, one whose stubborn sense of worth
depends on the thankless task of shaping up an ungrateful rebel.

The
kind of goodness that appears as a resentful rebellion against evil is
not genuine. Say you have a disgusting brother. He is a dope fiend who
intimidates you all day long into tolerating his vile ways. You rebel
by being outwardly the good brother. But such goodness is an expression
of an egotistic value judgment, the sense of worth it gives existing only
in contrast to someone's being worse than you. "Good" guys often
take their role from disgust and judgment based on resentment. Often they
seek to validate their phony goodness and assuage the guilt it makes them
feel through "positive" reinforcements, the traditional "kosherizing"
emblems of churchgoing, degrees, success. Their love of worldly authority
provides a refuge from the authority of conscience. If you are one of
these, you send out confusing signals to your own children.

A subtle
yet powerful signal of violence projects through a sterile, rigid "love."
Apparently normal, establishment parents and teachers have been responsible
for incalculable misery since ancient times. In a democracy, the hypocrisy
of the establishment is the main cause of social chaos. Rebellion against
the smiling, hypocritical "normal people" of society produces
a variety of abhorrent and violent behaviors—bad guys rebelling
against the cruelty of conforming phonies. No wonder they cried, "Give
us Barabbas!" The hypocrites in Christ's day, as in ours, could not
bear the contrast of pure goodness.

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From
the intrigue between the apparently good and the obviously wicked, hell
evolves. And each "loyal" citizen responsible for a part of
the horror around us is guilty and afraid of facing the truth. When the
establishment bureaucrats are in power, their incredible insult to common
sense inspires rebellion and crime, which serve to distract us from seeing
guilt at the source. As the rebellious, low-life element of society hardens
and multiplies, it strikes at the foundation of democracy to overwhelm
it eventually on its course toward anarchy and dictatorship.

(Part
two next week)

To
free yourself from the state where neither rebellion nor conformity
helps, you must learn to deal properly, without resentment,
to pressures of any kind. My Be Still and Know meditation exercise shows
you how to do this and helps you practice remaining in the proper state.
You can get a copy at fhu.com
or by calling 800-877-3227.

Roy Masters—who
in his 80s continues to broadcast the longest-running counseling show
in talk radio history, his internationally syndicated daily radio program
Advice
Line, grew up in pre-WWII England. He started his journey toward
understanding human nature when as a teen he saw a stage hypnotist at
a vaudeville show in Brighton. The hypnotist easily put volunteer subjects
in a spell and made them do outlandish things, like dancing with a broom
and forgetting their own names.

Puzzled by the
hypnotist’s mysterious power, Roy distinctly remembers pondering
the question: “Why can’t hypnotism be used to make people
act sensibly, rather than foolishly?” Inspired by the idea of
harnessing this baffling force for good, he later pursued the art of
hypnotism and established a successful hypnotherapy practice.

After several years
of practice, Masters made his central and pivotal discovery about the
root of people’s emotional problems, addictions and complexes.
He realized that people did not need hypnosis, because their core problem
was that they are already hypnotized—not by a clever stage performer,
but by the stresses, pressures and seductions of daily life.

He used his knowledge
to discover a way to help us become de-hypnotized, and discovered that
the root of the power of negative suggestion lay in our wrong emotional
response, that of resentment. Masters’ remarkably effective exercise,
a simple observation technique called Be Still and Know—is at
the core of his unmatched track record in helping people overcome even
the most serious mental-emotional problems, and is the centerpiece of
a successful program within the U.S. military community (“Patriot
Outreach”) that is helping thousands of military personnel
and their families cope with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).